Scoble, I'd love if you could talk with him and ask him 5 questions[I don't expect an answer to the last one--atleast not publicly ]:

1) Given the massive amount of coordination between various MS platforms(Longhorn, Yukon, Whidbey, Tablet PC) needed before planning a PDC, and with so much not yet completely developed, how are you able to plan this far in advance?

2) Given the intensive amount of material being presented during a PDC, what is the event team doing to make being an attendee more manageable(last PDC due to scheduling conflicts Jim Alchin gave every attendee a DVD containing 50 of the most popular sessions)
how are you approaching this dilemma/problem?

3) At PDC 2003 blogging was the rage. Everywhere I looked I saw people wearing shirts saying, "I'm blogging this", what are your thoughts on enabling blogging before and during the PDC 2005.

4) PDC is incredible, almost every geek at Microsoft is out talking with people, so what's the worst logistical nightmare you've dealt with in past PDCs and what makes executing a PDC challenging/exciting?

5) Given the timeframe of big product releases such as Whidbey, betas of Longhorn, X-box2, Windows Mobile 2006, what will the PDC 2005 wow factors be, besides great content and access to Microsoft deliver, what's the developing story for PDC-->How will you
surpass the unveiling of Longhorn at PDC 2003? Plus will PDC 2005 have any jabs at apple, like apple had between Microsoft Longhorn and Apple’s Tiger (for example: get your photocopiers ready)

Just thought of another question6) What's the budget around swag giveaways for a PDC, i.e. how many free t-shirts are you expecting to give away?

Just a guess, but I'm thinking that PDC 2005 will be the Whidbey/64bit windows PDC. If marketing has their way this seems probably. It's strange having read about whidbey for the last 2 years and yet it still hasn't released, BUT I'd rather
wait for some massive unveiling where MS gets the developer story right than have Whidbey out early.

Sure development and documentation should be done, but all of the labs, websites, tools, and tips and tricks need alot more time to bake.

Well, it is expected that March would be the release time frame for XP 64 and PDC 2005 isn't until September 2005, thats a big gap in between March and September to promote the product (5-6 months). Visual Studio 2005 would be expected 2 months later after
XP 64 which would give Microsoft some time to show off some of the new 64 bit capabilities.That would leave little for the company to talk about the product at PDC '05 and most of interest on Longhorn.

Pocket XP, its not impossible for Microsoft to surprise us and release the beta 1 for Longhorn September 2005 to coincide with PDC 2005. This would further push beta 2 out to February or March 2006 or earlier if they have progress which can result in a short
beta.

Sticking to my original prediction (June 2005), I suspect that a beta 2 would come in January 2006 and could possibly push the final release out to November 2006 if you take into account release candidates.

Umm... is it not true that Microsoft has stopped the work on Milestones (eg, Milestone 9) and started work on Beta 1? I think it was mentioned in Paul Thurrott's daily newsletter.

I personally think Microsoft has held some nice info or feature of Longhorn from the general public and will use that to mesmerize everyone at PDC. I hope its "Guess what, we have Longhorn ready, here, take your copy." ... sigh ... I know, I know.

Anyways, so if they are working on Beta 1 right now, it doesn't seem impossible to get out a Beta to the PDC goers in almost 10 months.

I can answer one of your questions (#4) - Last years PDC happened at the same time as the massive LA fires. We were sitting in "the war room" when word came in that many of the airports were closed due to the main aircraft control tower being in the path
of the flames. This was on Sunday and we were scrambling to figure out how to get not only the attendees into town, but keynote speakers as well. There are some great stories about the lengths people went to getting to LA.

The 2003 PDC was my 5th PDC. I'm usually pretty hard core about absorbing as much as I can but the 2003 PDC pushed me to my limits

Thanks for the feedback. Some quick responses: we do think about the attendee "load", and loved hearing your specific suggestions... keep 'em coming.

We thought long and hard about scheduling sessions over lunch, and in the end decided on a limited number of shorter sessions, which were also repeated a number of times throughout the week so that you'd never have to choose between lunch and a session. (Lunch
is very important to me

Re: WiFi: oh boy. 802.11b just sucks in this regard... it's pretty much the defacto standard but it also can't handle the density we see at the event. We explicitly decided, for instance, to not try to provide coverage in the keynote hall. Access Points are
getting better every year but it's definitely incremental. That's why we also provided so many wired ports.

Question: how often did your laptop run out of juice?

Re: mail system... did you check out the "Vibe!" application? The idea is that you could "opt in" to be found by others. But this is not a new problem, and there
are a number of existing solutions out there. Yes, we want to do better here.

I understand that it's too early to say what registration fee is gonna be, but does anyone have any idea what it was the last time ? I have a feeling that it was between 1500 - 2000 USD (PDC03), am I right ?

The full-price registration fee will almost definitely be the same as last time ($1995).

2) Given the intensive amount of material being presented during a PDC, what is the event team doing to make being an attendee more manageable(last PDC due to scheduling conflicts Jim Alchin gave every attendee a DVD containing 50 of the most popular sessions)
how are you approaching this dilemma/problem?

This is something we talk about quite a bit, actually. I'd love to hear specific suggestions about what we could do here. On the one hand, it's pretty much a goal to provide as much content/info/community opportunity as possible, to make the event memorable.
Of course, on the other hand, if one's head explodes during a keynote on Day 3, then you can't remember anything at all...